The inshore marker had been laid last night, probably by a CMB from Dunkirk. It was a small moored buoy with a black flag on it, ten miles east-south-east of No. 8 buoy, where at 8.45 the minelaying flotilla had altered course and reduced speed to twelve knots.
Wyatt watched the destroyers ahead swing away to starboard. He knew they’d be turning round the buoy, but it wasn’t yet visible from Mackerel here at the tail-end of the procession. Musician had put her helm over: you could see the swirl of white, like a pool of spilt milk spreading as the rudder dragged her stern round. Wyatt, with his glasses up, muttered to himself, ‘There it is.’ He meant the marker buoy. It was very small and so was the flag on it, and nobody who wasn’t looking for it in this spot would have seen it except by purest chance.
‘Port fifteen.’
'Port fifteen, sir!’ Bellamy span his wheel, putting on starboard rudder. Wyatt bent to the voicepipe and told the engineroom, ‘Three hundred revolutions.’ Acknowledgement floated hoarsely from the tube, and the coxswain reported, ‘Fifteen o’ port wheel on, sir.’ Everyone spoke rather more quietly than usual, as they turned down towards the enemy-held coast. But it wasn’t the nearness of Germans doing that, it was the load they carried aft. Mackerel swung round across a half-acre patch of ploughed-up sea, and as she went round it the marked buoy was bobbing like a float with some great fish nibbling at the hook below it. They swept round it, heeling, and Pym called down to the midshipman in the chartroom, ‘Six miles from now!’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
It was nine-eighteen. Not that timing was strictly necessary at this point; the next turn, like the others, would be a matter of following when Moloch turned. After that it would be stop-watch timing while the mines were laid. Meanwhile six miles at twelve knots meant another half-hour before they could begin to shed the explosive load.
‘Midships.’
‘Midships, sir.’
The brass caps on the wheel’s spokes flickered dully in the binnacle’s faint radiance as they circled. ‘Wheel’s amidships, sir.’
‘Meet her—’
‘Meet her, sir!’
‘—and follow Musician, cox’n.’ Wyatt left Pym at the binnacle, and moved into the starboard fore corner of the bridge. Nick transferred himself to the port side and further aft. Wyatt called to Pym, ‘Come down to two-nine-oh revs, pilot.’
Wind and sea – about enough to make the snotty and the ship’s cat seasick – were on the starboard bow now, on this course just west of south, and the ship was rolling as well as pitching. She’d get livelier when she’d lost the weight of the mines; and if the breeze had risen this much in the last half-hour there was no telling how it might be by midnight. Poor little Grant, he thought. There weren’t many things worse than chronic seasickness. He had his glasses up and he was sweeping the darkness on the port side, starting at the bow and sweeping back across the black frozen emptiness towards the stern. The glasses were trained out at about seventy on the bow when the German destroyer-shapes swam into them.
Just suddenly – like that – there they were.
And only himself seeing them. For half a second perhaps they were his private, as well as hardly believable, enemy. Staring at them; and conscious of the mines…
‘Enemy destroyers seventy on the port bow, moving right to left – three – no, four—’
‘Very good.’
Very good?
It wasn’t real enough to be a nightmare. One had thought of it, envisaged it: here it was, and it was as if it wasn’t. Wyatt said, ‘Yes, I’m on ’em! Pilot, keep your eyes on the next ahead.’ Nick was telling Hatcher, ‘Bearing red ninety degrees, range oh-one-oh.’ Hatcher was setting it on his transmitter dial. Nick snatched up the navyphone. ‘One and two guns, follow pointers, load and stand by!’ He said into the torpedo-sight navyphone ‘Mr Gladwish – train your tubes port beam. Enemy destroyers passing on opposite course, fifteen knots, range one thousand. Do not engage, just stand by.’ His voice had been little more than a whisper, he realised. But Mackerel sounded like a brass band, felt like a cruise ship – floodlit, impossible not to see from miles away, let alone that bare five cables… He had his glasses on them again now; he heard Wyatt mutter, They’re big destroyers. Almost certainly it’s…’ His voice faded out. For a small ship moving at only twelve knots, Mackerel seemed to be throwing an enormous wake. Were the Hum blind? Or still so near their base – Zeebrugge – that they weren’t bothering to keep a proper lookout yet?
No. It would start, at any second. There’d be the blinding flashes of their guns: Nick had his eyes narrowed, actually ready for it. At this range, they wouldn’t miss.
Bellamy’s voice broke the silence.
‘It’s the schnapps they put away. Rots the eyeball, I been told.’
Nick was holding his breath. He thought, Why don’t we slow down and cut that bloody wash? He answered his own question: if they did, they’d lose contact with Musician. And this was the run-in to the minelaying area, it would have botched the whole operation.
Might the Germans think these British and French ships, so close to Zeebrugge and steaming towards it, were Huns like themselves? If that was the case it would mean there were even more of them about, and at sea, in this area… But all four had passed the beam; which was the closest point. From now on the range would be opening, and the chance of some Hun opening his eyes or considering the possible rewards of turning his square head to the left were being steadily reduced.
Did Germans have square eyes, too?
He didn’t think those were Heinecke’s ships. They’d looked big at first, but—
Using the past tense, he realized. It was incredible: they’d passed, a whole flotilla of Germans had passed at no more than five cables’ lengths and just – gone on…
Wyatt roared suddenly, ‘Herr Heinecke! Damn sure of it! Of all the filthy luck!’
He was wrong. Nick was certain those hadn’t been the ‘Argentinians’. Ship recognition was something he was good at, and he’d have sworn they were either Schichaus or Krupp ‘G' class. He also felt that there was luck and luck, and that Mackerel had just had her share of it. Touch wood… The enemy ships were still in sight: not separate shapes now, only a smear on the quarter drawing aft and growing fainter, merging into the surrounding dark. He heard Wyatt ask Pym, ‘How long before we’re there?’
No relief in his tone: only a touch of impatience. One could guess the intention in his mind: to get rid of the mines and then go after those destroyers. But it would be necessary to contact Moloch by lamp first, and to use a lamp when they were as close inshore as they would be when the laying started – it simply wasn’t possible. Any more than one could have sent an enemy report by wireless, giving German shore-stations a chance to take cross-bearings on the transmissions.
Pym had told Wyatt, ‘Twelve minutes, sir.’ And the Huns had disappeared north-westward. An enemy report would have been of enormous value to Admiral Bacon in his Dover headquarters, and to the other divisions of the Sixth Flotilla. But at least they’d been warned, with that signal about German wireless activity – which looked now as if it might have been well founded. Intelligence was pretty hot these days, under Admiral Hall. Nick heard Wyatt say to Pym, ‘All right, I’ve got her.’ He meant he’d taken over the conning of the ship again. Nick told Hatchet, ‘All guns train fore and aft.’ He went to the navyphone at the torpedo sight and spoke to Mr Gladwish.
‘We were lucky, that time. Train fore and aft, please.’
Gladwish said, ‘I lost a stone, that’s all… Aye aye.’
Everyone knew how Gladwish felt about mines. He hated them. It happened that mines came into the scope of the torpedo department. Wyatt asked Pym, ‘How long now?’
Pym got the answer from Grant, up the voicepipe, ‘Seven minutes, sir.’ Wyatt raised his voice above the ship-noise, wind-and-sea racket. ‘Number One! Have ’em stand by aft!’
‘Aye aye, sir,’ He got Gladwish again. ‘Stand by to lay mines. I’ll use the voicepipe now. First one at my order when we finish the turn in about five minutes, then intervals of seven seconds.’
The explosive eggs had to be laid one hundred and fifty feet apart. At twelve knots the intervals between dropping them should therefore be seven and a half seconds, but to make sure of getting rid of them inside the distance it was better to ignore that half second and call it seven. The first twenty would be laid in one half-mile line, and then the ship would be turned four points, forty-five degrees, to starboard, to drop the second twenty in a line at that angle to the first lot. As the last mine, number 40, splashed into the wake, a flash on a shaded blue lamp would tell Musician to start laying hers. She’d spread her first twenty along the original straight course and then turn four points to port, not starboard as Mackerel had done, for the others. Ahead of her, as she finished laying, the rearmost Frenchman would put down the same right-handed dog-leg pattern as Mackerel had done; and so on, alternately one way and the other, so that the end result would be two hundred mines planted in a sort of fishbone pattern, much harder to locate and sweep than they would have been in straight lines.
Grant called up, ‘One minute to the turn, sir!’ Nick used the voicepipe to what was normally the stern four-inch gun. ‘Stand by, Mr Gladwish. Less than one minute.’
The gunner would have a stopwatch in his hand. His righthand man, CPO Hobson, would be operating the release-gear of the trap while CPO Swan supervised the business of winching the mines aft, one from each side alternately so the ship wouldn’t take on a list. It was always tricky work, in total darkness on a slippery, pitching deck dotted about with gear and fittings to trip a man and send him skidding overboard. And it had to be kept moving smoothly: no jamming-up, no trolleys coming off the rails.
Wyatt said suddenly, ‘There he goes.’ He meant Moloch, turning hard a-starboard. Grant squawked in the copper tube, ‘Should turn now, sir!’
The leading French destroyer was under helm. And now the second one… Just after 9.50: a few minutes ahead of schedule. Wyatt ordered, ‘Port fifteen. Stand by to lay mines.’
‘Port fifteen, sir!’
'Stand by aft!’
‘Stand by!’ Gladwish in one shout acknowledged the order and passed it to his minions. Even more faintly up the voicepipe came CPO Hobson’s ‘Ready, sir!’ to Gladwish.
‘Midships.’
Musician had steadied on the laying course, due west. The flotilla was now less than three miles off a coast bristling with Germans and heavy guns.
‘Meet her!’
‘Meet her, sir!’ Wheel flying round… Wyatt shouted, ‘Steady! Start laying!’
‘Go!’
A bellow from Gladwish: a clanking sound echoing in the voicepipe: then Gladwish counted the first one as it went off the chute: ‘One!’
Craning out over the bridge rail, looking aft, Nick saw the splash expanding in a white circle from the wake, and then the mine itself bobbing astern like some great toy before the sinker took charge of it, dragged it down to its set depth, which would allow for the rise and fall of tide. It was just about low water now: it had been half-tide when they’d groped their way past Dunkirk. Each time a mine dropped off the chutes Mr Gladwish called its number: ‘Five… six… seven…’
Bellamy said, ‘Steady, sir, course west.’
Gladwish’s voice up the tube: ‘Eleven… twelve… thirteen…’ Lucky number: time for one of the rollers to jam in the rails, or the winch to break down, a wire to snap… ‘eighteen… nineteen… twenty, sir!’
‘Port fifteen!’
Bellamy’s growl acknowledged it as he flung the wheel around. Gladwish’s team continued sending mines over as the destroyer began her turn to starboard. ‘Twenty-one…’
‘Midships!’
‘Midships, sir.’ And from that after voicepipe, ‘Twenty-two… twenty-three… twenty-four…’
‘Meet her, cox’n, and steer north-west.’
‘Steer north-west, sir!’
‘Twenty-eight…’
‘Course nor’-west, sir.’
‘Very good. Wyatt was staring aft through his glasses, seeing the mines bob and sway away and vanish into the grim cover of the sea. Leading Signalman Porter, with the signal lamp resting in the crook of his left arm, was using binoculars one-handed to keep track of Musician, so he could aim his lamp accurately when the moment came. Wyatt asked gruffly, ‘Ready, Porter?’
‘Ready, sir’. Gladwish shouted, ‘Thirty-two!’ Eight to go. Less than a minute’s work Then what? Nick asked himself what he’d do, in Wyatt’s shoes. Chase that enemy flotilla? Or obey the orders, go to No.8 buoy and wait for the other four to rendezvous there when they’d finished turning this strip of sea into a new death trap… He knew what he’d have done, all right. Now Gladwish’s final yell was triumphant: ‘Forty!’ Porter’s lamp clicked, emitting its bright-blue wink: Musician would have seen it and by this time her first mine would be trundling off its chute. Wyatt roared into the engine-room voicepipe, ‘Seven-five-oh revolutions! I want all we’ve got now, Chief, full power!’
Full power…
Going hunting!
Racing north-westward, wind and sea on her port bow, Mackerel plunged and rolled and shook, the high whine of her turbines and the throaty roar of ventilators competing with the sounds of weather. On the bridge you had to scream if you wanted to be heard, pitching the voice high to cut across the cacophony of steel and sea and engines and the howl of wind, wind mostly of the ship’s own making as she tore into it through the dark. Seas burst crashing against her bow, flinging spray that lashed like hail across the forefront of the bridge, ringing on the thin steel plating and drumming on the canvas splinter-mattresses; the spray streamed overhead, slashed at icy, numbed hands and faces, more like chips of ice than wind-driven water. Wyatt yelled into the funnel-shaped opening of the engine-room voicepipe, ‘Seven hundred revolutions!’ Reckoning that if they were going to cut off those Germans at all they’d be within a few miles of them by now, and that glowing funnel-tops wouldn’t help Mackerel to get in close: even Germans as blind as that lot must have eyes for flames coming at them out of the night. Wyatt had shouted, a minute ago, ‘They can’t see, so perhaps they can’t fight, either!’ Guns’ and tubes’ crews were standing by: there was a chance, no more than that, and if it came they weren’t going to miss it. Not a bad chance, more than the usual needle in a haystack; the enemy ships had been steering a northerly course and it was virtually certain they’d turn westward at some point, that by now they would have turned; and they’d been doing roughly fifteen knots. Mackerel was thundering north-westward at twice that speed, cutting the corner; if it had been daylight she could have expected to run into them, she’d have had a lookout up on the searchlight platform to expand her range of vision and she’d have quite likely had them in sight by now: by now, Nick thought, knowing they could at this moment be a mile away, no more than a couple of thousand yards and still invisible. There wasn’t time to think about the odds of four to one, or of having only two guns and one pair of tubes. If it did cross one’s mind one could also think of the four other ships, two British and two French, just a few miles to the south’ard there; if Mackerel managed to bring the enemy to action, gunflashes would very soon bring up reinforcements. But that was something to consider later, if at all: one thing mattered, one thing was to be prayed for, and that was to find those four—
They found Mackerel…
An explosion of light: a searchlight: its beam burst in their faces. A great bayonet of light, bomb-like in its suddenness, blinding, mind-stabbing. Guns firing ahead, scarlet spurts in an arc across the bow, funnelling-in on the blinded ship as she rushed towards them.
‘Hit that bloody light!’
Wyatt’s bellow: men blinded, shielding their eyes. Nick was already telling Clover over the navyphone, ‘Target that searchlight, rapid independent, commence!’ It must have been three, four seconds since the light had first stabbed at them and transfixed them. Wyatt roared, ‘Open fire, Number One!’ The foc’sl gun fired before he’d finished the sentence, and Mackerel was already being hit repeatedly by the broadsides of the four Germans as they raced westward across her bow. All she could do for the moment was take punishment and use her one gun that could bear. Shellbursts flamed: the reek of cordite swept over and away in the wind: there was a shoot of livid flame on the port side for’ard and a clang as another hit skipped off the foc’sl and ricocheted away without exploding, You could hear shrapnel tearing into the splinter mattresses, battering the superstructure: another crash for’ard, and Nick saw the great spray of the explosion, orange and yellow with expanding points like shooting stars – that one had burst near the capstan, on the centreline. Wyatt was shouting above the din of gunfire and bursting shells and the roar of wind and sea, ‘Tubes stand by starboard – I’m turning to port, Number One!’
‘Aye aye, sir!’ He got on the line to the torpedo gunner. ‘We’re altering to port. Train tubes starboard and stand by!’
Shells scrunched overhead: Mackerel bow-on was a small target, and more were missing than hitting. Then a section of one funnel flared orange, burnt crackling for a moment until the paint had scorched off it, died to a glow of red-hot, wind-fanned metal. Nick had Cockcroft on the gun-control navyphone; he told him, ‘We’ll be turning to port now and your gun will bear. Rapid independent and pick your own targets, right?’ He heard the foc’sl four-inch bang off about its eighth or ninth shot, and at the same moment a tearing crash just below the bridge to port told of another hit. Stink of burning: the back of the bridge seemed to be all flames. Racket tremendous, deafening, shots and explosions and other noise merging into one continuous roar of sound; on the port bow, flames sprang up, danced long enough to silhouette black figures of German sailors rushing aft along a destroyer’s deck. Glover’s gun was scoring, then. Nick yelled even louder into the navyphone, ‘Sub, are you there, d’you understand?’ Cockcroft said yes, he was and he did; he didn’t sound as if he was shouting, just chatting rather more loudly than usual; Nick heard cheering, and that torturing light went out, as abruptly as if someone had pulled a fuse. The for’ard gun had hit the searchlight: he found himself waiting for another to take its place. Cockcroft added, ‘Couple of chaps ’ve been hit by splinters, here.’ Nick heard Wyatt shout to Bellamy, ‘Hard a-starboard, cox’n!’ He told Cockcroft, ‘Helm’s going over now.’ He banged the ’phone down on its hook and half slid across an already tilting deck to the starboard torpedo sight. The searchlight beam and most of the gunfire had been coming from clear out on the port bow in the last – oh, minutes, seconds, you couldn’t reckon time once all this started – so it would probably be the tail-end ships they’d fire their fish at. He lined his binoculars up with the pointers of the sight as Mackerel tightened her turn to port; the night was all flying, whistling, scrunching shells and blossoms of flame, thuds and crashes as shells burst and the sharper snapping crashes of Mackerel’s own guns firing: Cockcroft’s was in it now, and getting hits. Nick had the torpedo sight set – giving the enemy twenty knots and a course of west. It was a matter of waiting for the turn, for the ship to get round through ninety degrees and the aiming pointers to come on their target, and the hope was that the torpedo would streak out and find a meeting-point with the enemy destroyer. The third in the line of four, he was going for. All she’d have to do, to meet the torpedo which he’d be sending out ahead of her, was continue at her present course and speed. And now most conveniently one of Mackerel’s guns scored a hit on that German’s stern and started a blaze going… But they were pumping shells over this way fast as Mackerel swung and exposed her length to them; there’d been a number of hits aft and there was at least one fire burning. Nick shut his mind to it: all that mattered was to get the torpedo on its way. You had to ignore distractions, concentrate on the fighting and cope later with the damage. There’d be plenty, he knew. An explosion just behind and above him threw him forward against the sight, and he thought he’d cut his face open: no time for any-thing but Mackerel swinging and not far to go now, no need for binoculars with the target lit up by her fires: the first one had taken hold and spread. He watched her along the pointers of the torpedo sight while Mackerel leaned hard over under helm and the sea crashed against her bow: both guns firing rapidly, using the enemy’s blazing stern as an aiming point. Mackerel herself still being punished. Men would be dying back there where the Germans’ shells were bursting, and more would be killed and maimed before they got that fish away and turned back out of this storm of high explosive. He was pleading through clenched teeth, Come on, come on! He heard Wyatt’s shout to the cox’n, ‘Midships!’ and crouched intently behind the sight, narrowing his eyes against the gun- and shell-flashes; he knew that the after end of the bridge was wrecked and that there’d be frightful damage as well as loss of life and more surgical work than McAllister would be competent to handle; but both guns still fired and the sight came up passing the rearmost enemy: range what, three cables? – and touching now the stern of the target ship, moving on tip – flames almost covering her, now – where Mackerel’s shells were driving in and bursting. He called Gladwish with the navyphone in his left hand, ‘Stand by!’ Then the sight touched the German’s for’ard funnel, which was part of the black mass of his bridge; in the second after he’d yelled ‘Fire!’ he realized that she was slowing and that the fourth ship was closing up on her quite fast. So the torpedo would miss: he’d had the sight set for an enemy speed of twenty, and she wasn’t doing twelve now. A shell burst in the side of the bridge just below him: a white sheet of flame shot up vertically, with a thrust and roar of heat that pushed him back and scorched the skin of his face, momentarily blinding him. There was a smell like shoeing horses, and it was his own hair or eyebrows singeing off, but he was at the sight again hearing Wyatt ordering ‘Port fifteen!’ Somewhere in very recent memory Gladwish had reported ‘Torpedo fired…’ Mackerel was swinging back northwards again; it had all been for nothing, for one torpedo that would run out its range and then sink. Another hit close by sent the same whitish-yellow flashing upwards, scorching heat and blast. Slightly aft, to his right; he glanced that way half expecting to see Wyatt dead, the steering gone; but Wyatt was there, rock-like, silhouetted against the fires in the ship’s waist and afterpart, and Bellamy sang out in his calm but strident, noise-beating tone, ‘Fifteen o’ port wheel on, sir…’
Turning for what, Nick wondered – to reduce their size as a target for the Hun gunners, or to pass under the last German’s stern? There’d been two hits for’ard and now three enemy ships were on the port bow as Mackerel swung her stern past them; they were continuing westward while their guns still fired on the after bearing, over their port quarters. The other, the fourth of the line – no, the third, those two had changed places – the destroyer that was on fire was almost right ahead, just fine on the starboard bow; Wyatt yelled at Bellamy, ‘Midships, and meet her!’ Nick saw it suddenly: he was going to ram… The foc’sl four-inch was still banging away fast at the already hard-hit enemy, while Cockcroft’s gun amidships was lobbing shells after the other three; Nick, wondering if they were getting any hits, had just raised his glasses for a look when the nearest of them – the ship that had originally been number four – blew up in a great gush of flame.
Mackerel’s torpedo had missed one, hit another. Wyatt shouted, ‘Every shot a coconut! Well done, Number One!’ Guns’ crews were cheering. Orange flame edged and patterned with black, oily smoke lit the night: the German had been struck abaft the bridge and almost certainly in a fuel tank. She was a torch – no, two torches, two burning halves drifting apart. A roaring sound ripped across the sea: then the sound died with the flames as both halves sank and the water snuffed out everything except oil floating on its surface. Wyatt bawled, ‘Stand by to ram!’
The for’ard gun was still banging away and hitting the burning enemy ahead, but it wasn’t deterring him from shooting back. But Mackerel had some advantage: she was a narrow, bow-on shape, and the German was broadside-on and already much worse hit. One cable’s length away now, or even less. Nick leant over the front of the bridge and shouted to the gun’s crew, ‘Stand by to ram! Lie flat and hold on!’ A shellburst drove him back, and at that moment he thought he’d seen Clover, the GM fall. Mackerel was lurching, plunging forward, Bellamy handling the wheel with strength as well as skill, holding her against the thrust of wind and sea, grinning slit-eyed into the wind, his weight to the left to keep weather helm on her and Wyatt shouting in his ear, ‘Make sure of it, now, cox’n!’ Nick called Cockcroft – the after gun had ceased fire, lacking any target it could bear on – and told him, ‘Stand by to ram – pass the word to hold on!’ It was the last thing Cockcroft would ever hear from him. The German destroyer lay right ahead, lit by her own fires and with men running for’ard along her upper deck and two guns still firing. She was trying to turn away to starboard but she’d begun the attempt too late: Mackerel was rushing at her – a black, battered, flaming missile tearing across broken sea. Just before she struck she seemed to launch herself upward – as if the ship knew what she was doing and wanted to do the job as effectively as possible; then her stern with its underwater ram smashed like an axe-head into the German’s side.
As if the world had been jolted off its bearings and stopped dead, and the sky had fallen in, blackness smothering, crushing, and light then springing through the wreckage, yellow leaping light of flames from the burning German with the British ship embedded in her. Some time had passed: moments, or a minute? Moments, probably. He heard, as he scrambled up, Wyatt shouting down to them to stop both engines. Shouts, screaming, and shots – small-arms – and suddenly the crash of the foc’sl four-inch: it had fired at maximum depression but its shell had passed over the German without touching him: he was ridden-down, still going over, under Mackerel’s forefoot. Rifle or revolver shots, and something whirred past very close. Looking for its source, Nick saw the flash of another shot, from the German’s bridge: then Wyatt had lurched up against him at the front rail, and he was shouting to the gun’s crew below them, ‘Cutlasses! Cutlasses and bayonets, you men down there! Repel boarders, damn you, don’t stand and watch ’em!’ He’d swung round: ‘Bosun’s Mate!’ The German destroyer was right over, practically on her beam ends and nearly cut in two; men were trying to scramble from her port side to Mackerel’s foc’sl. Boarders? Nick looked back over his shoulder for the bosun’s mate, Biddulph; but there was no back to the bridge, only a tangle of twisted steel, torn plating, the mainmast’s paint smouldering and the foremost funnel riddled, shot through like a colander, hardly enough of it left to hold up; in the remains of the bridge’s afterpart Nick saw a foot in a boot with some shinbone sticking out of it, and what might have been the same man’s (or another’s) shoulder, and a pulpy mess in a Balaclava helmet dangling from something impaled on ribbons of black metal. Biddulph wouldn’t be piping ‘Hands to repel boarders‘, or anything else. And Porter, the leading signalman: he’d been at the rear of the bridge, and so must Hatcher have been: they too must be part of that horror-fantasy. Wyatt, leaning over the front of the bridge, was shouting ‘Stop them! Stop them!’ He was sighting down the barrel of a pistol. Nick saw the coxswain, Bellamy, with his right hand on the wheel still but his left round Pym’s shoulders; his face was all blood and you could see the bone of his skull. Pym looked dazed. Wyatt roared. ‘At them! Shoot ’em! Drive ’em back where they belong!’ Nick looked down there, saw a group of Germans and some of Mackerel’s men rushing at them, and another German sailor coming over the side, climbing over laboriously with his mouth wide open, either screaming something continuously or his face distorted like that by fear: he was right up now, beside the clump cathead, with his hands up; Wyatt took aim, and shot him. Nick saw the man collapse and fall backwards into his own ship’s flames. Wyatt was chuckling as he pointed the revolver at some other German, and bellowing encouragement to the men down there to clear the ship of boarders. Nick heard him shout, ‘That’s the way, young Grant! At ’em, seek ’em out, go at ’em!’ Grant, that kid? Wyatt had fired again; he shouted, ‘You would, would you, you damned Hun!’ He turned to Nick, grinning happily: ‘Here, Number One, want a shot?’ Offering him the revolver. Nick didn’t want it: Wyatt insisted, ‘Here, take it, I’ve had my fun!’ Nick, looking down at the mêlée on the foc’sl, saw that the bow seemed to have been forced upwards, out of line: there’d be plates strained and buckled and quite likely underwater damage. He opened his hand, let the revolver drop, turned to see Pym easing Bellamy down on to the deck with his back against the binnacle; Wyatt shouted, ‘Pilot, get the Leading Tel up here, and a position from young Grant.’ Then he remembered that Grant wasn’t in the chartroom, and corrected, ‘No – go down and work out a position, and have Wolstenholme send this:
To ‘Moloch’, repeated F0 Dover and Captain (D) Six, from ‘Mackerel’: Have sunk one German destroyer by torpedo and rammed another. My position so-and-so. Two regrettably surviving Huns last seen proceeding westward twenty knots. Got that?’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
‘Where are you going, Number One?’
‘Below, sir, to inspect the damage for’ard.’
‘Damage? What damage?’ He’d been preoccupied with his ‘fun'. Now he was gazing down at the bow itself, ignoring the few surviving Germans on it. They were being permitted to surrender, apparently. Nick didn’t wait. The starboard side of the bridge was smoking, smouldering hot, and the ladder had been shot away; he crossed to the other side and went down the port ladder. There was a jagged-edged rip in the starboard side of the chartroom; inside, everything was smashed. He was looking in through smaller perforations in this near side. It was a miracle that Grant had survived. The wireless office seemed to be intact. Pym grasped Nick’s arm: he was staring at what had been a chart-table, charts, instruments: ‘How – how can I work out a position?’
‘Tell them “vicinity No. 8 buoy”. That’s near enough. Moloch will have seen the shooting anyway.’
Pym nodded, as relieved-looking as if Nick had saved his life. Nick thought, Bloody fool! He turned aft, found that the ladder down to the iron deck was distorted but useable. The whaler’s planks were still burning in the davits: on the other side the 20-foot motorboat was matchwood piled round a charred engine. He was wrenching at the buckled screen door, wanting to get in past the galley and down to the for’ard messdecks; a sailor stopped to help.
McKechnie. Last night they’d been in a different kind of fight together. It might have been a year ago… McKechnie added his weight to Nick’s and they forced the door back; he asked Nick, ‘Did ye know the sub-lieutenant’s killed, sir?’
It sank in.
Cockcroft, dead. McKechnie added, ‘There’s a dozen or more, sir, and a lot wounded too. Back aft it’s terrible.’ Nick told him, ‘Find the doctor, tell him the cox’n’s on the bridge with a bad head-wound. Then go up there yourself and tell the captain I’ve sent you as relief helmsman.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Memory was to come in fragments: like snapshots, impressions printed on the brain that would probably never leave it. Images, bursts of recorded sound that you heard again after-wards and thought about, glimpses of detail in a broad area of confusion. Important things and utterly unimportant ones – like Chief Petty Officer Swan, when Nick stared at him for a moment hardly knowing who he was, telling him ‘I shaved off, sir.’
‘I think we’ve some flooding for’ard. Come on down.’ Then a hideous grinding sound, and the nightmarish impression that it was the bow breaking away from the rest of her; but it was the German destroyer rolling over, turning turtle, scraping against Mackerel’s stern as she slid away and sank, the sea hissing, smacking its lips as it engulfed her and drowned her fires. Nick and Swan and the men on the bridge and foc’sl saw her go, a boil of foam and steam grey through the darkness, and light from that distant oil-slick flickering across the water. Then – suddenly – Mackerel lurched: as if she’d been relying on her beaten enemy’s support… As Nick flung himself up the twisted ladder to the foc’sl he heard Wyatt bellow over the bridge rail, ‘Collision mat, there! Get a mat over, jump to it now!’
The bow had changed shape: the foc’sl deck from just for’ard of the gun had folded downwards, so that it wasn’t a deck anyone could have walked on now, only a sag of steel that groaned and creaked as the ship moved to the sea. Nick told Swan, ‘Take charge here. I’m going below.’ He saw Grant, and called to him, ‘Mid, you come with me.’ The snotty said, ‘Two of the gun’s crew are dead, and the GM’s wounded in the stomach.’ Nick thought, Cockcroft’s dead, too… Someone had told him so – an hour ago? Cockcroft, with his small eccentricities and his amusing, pleasant manner… Grant asked him, pointing, ‘What about them?’ The German survivors: they stood in a close group, some of them frightened-looking and some hostile: two sailors with fixed bayonets faced them. Nick told one, a leading stoker, ‘Take ’em below, and keep a guard on them.’ He thought as he hurried down the ladder that with any luck the bulkheads down there might hold for a while, so long as Wyatt didn’t try to use the engines. He thought, They’ve got to, that’s all! We’ve a lot of wounded, and no boats.